Moving Dartmouth Forward

News

Of the three behaviors we’ve studied as a committee, sexual assault is undoubtedly the most devastating, the one that leaves the deepest scars on both individual victims and the community in general. Defined as any unwanted or unwelcome touching of a sexual nature that occurs without valid consent, sexual assault is also notoriously difficult to measure and to address. National studies suggest that sexual assault is widespread on college campuses, affecting as many as one in every four or five students. Yet it is also vastly underreported.

In our October 13 post, “What We Have Learned: High-Risk Drinking,“ we discussed the phenomenon of high-risk drinking on our campus and on university campuses nationwide. In this letter, we would like to present our findings around the lack of inclusivity, a phenomenon that has proven to be as troubling to our community and as antithetical to our educational mission as binge drinking.

The Moving Dartmouth Forward Presidential Steering Committee was charged with making recommendations to President Phil Hanlon that will combat the root causes of extreme behavior in the critical areas of sexual assault and high-risk drinking, and will also seek to foster more inclusivity on campus.

After spending the last six months examining extreme behaviors on campus, assessing their root causes, and looking at the way peer institutions have dealt with their own versions of these problems, we believe we are well on our way to offering a set of recommendations to President Hanlon that will strengthen our campus and make it a safer and more inclusive place.

As we move into an energetic fall term on campus, the Moving Dartmouth Forward committee is compiling all of its feedback, data, best practices, and long-term goals to think realistically about what will best help Dartmouth to end harmful and extreme behavior on campus.

In May, the Steering Committee partnered with Improve Dartmouth: On the Ground, a student group, to help collect student ideas. Improve Dartmouth: On the Ground facilitated 41 student discussions between May and July. This document contains 250 separate ideas, submitted by 560 students, on ways to address high-risk drinking, sexual assault, and exclusivity at Dartmouth. The ideas were consolidated from 740 posts to otg.improvedartmouth.com; many of them were posted directly to the site during the facilitated discussions.

This document is not representative of the entire student body, nor is it representative of all the suggestions received by the steering committee. The steering committee has held additional meetings with students, and received input from more than 53 alumni meetings and conference calls, as well as more than 1650 online submissions.

As summer term winds down, we are gratified to witness a surge of engagement with our committee work on campus. Student groups have been reaching out to us with regularity to ask how they can be involved in the effort to address extreme behavior on campus. The recent marathon half-day conference on sexual assault hosted by Bones Gate fraternity, which drew approximately 130 Dartmouth men and ended with a candlelight vigil on the steps of Dartmouth Hall, was testimony to the sincere interest and concern felt by many on campus about the complex problem of sexual assault. Thanks are due to the organizers of this conference. We hope their investment, and that of many other students in making Dartmouth safer, healthier, and more inclusive, will continue into the fall and beyond.

Claudia J. Bayliff is an attorney and educator with more than 26 years of experience working on issues related to sexual assault. She was the first chief of the U.S. Air Force’s worldwide Sexual Assault Prevention and Response Program, and currently serves as Legal Momentum’s project attorney, developing judicial educational materials about sexual assault and helping to implement a nationwide, comprehensive plan for judicial education about sexual assault.

“We were thrilled when Dartmouth agreed to host the first summit,” says Bayliff. “The goal of the summit was to bring together a multidisciplinary group of stakeholders, including federal policy makers, to discuss the issues campuses are facing. Unlike other conferences, the summit was designed to create a mechanism for the participants to address these difficult issues on an ongoing basis.”

The committee has been busy meeting with alumni, students, staff and faculty, collecting suggestions about how to deal with high-risk drinking, sexual assault and a lack of inclusivity. We’ve also invited online submissions on how to deal with these issues; over 1600 members of the Dartmouth community have sent in ideas.

With the end of Sophomore Parents’ Weekend, our feedback-gathering phase of Moving Dartmouth Forward has also finally come to a close. As many on campus are aware, our committee has spent the last three months looking into some troublesome aspects of student life: high-risk or binge drinking, sexual assault, and lack of inclusivity. By crowd-sourcing ideas and opinions from students, alumni, faculty, staff, and parents, our process has been amazingly effective.